FreeBSD 15 on a Laptop
58 points by cullum
58 points by cullum
I appreciate this, but wow is that a lot of manual steps to do a bunch of things that should be done for you by the installer.
Laptop support on FreeBSD has historically been half-functional and limited to diehard enthusiasts.
Recently a lot of effort has gone into porting wifi and graphics drivers from Linux, making laptop use possible for much larger group of people.
So, we're kind of like how Linux was in the 2000s. There's work to be done, and this is front lines effort!
slowly, but surely - linux wasn't that great ~10-15 years ago, FreeBSD will get there too
15 years ago was 2011 and my laptop then had working bluetooth, wifi, camera, mic whatnot on fedora without any of this manual tweaking. The laptop I bought 2 years later was the same just with ubuntu instead of fedora. I think you are misremembering things. Maybe 20 years ago, but not 10-15 years ago.
I envy you - my laptop (Lenovo G510 in ~2013-2016) had huge issues with wifi, bluetooth was entirely out of question and intel haswell+amd gpu combo wasn't great. And don't get me wrong, I was trying to use it with various distros (ubuntu, fedora, suse, mint, arch and a metric ton of others) - I've found out only fedora was working kinda ok with this setup.
yeah, 15 years ago the in-kernel amdgpu driver didn't exist yet. I remember distinctly using a AUR package with the proprietary driver to get sound via HDMI - which, fwiw, works perfectly on FreeBSD with drm-kmod
AMD GPUs used to be super iffy in Linux for laptops specifically. I was able to use my Radeon 9800 just fine back in the mid 2000s, but none of my laptops with AMD chipsets played well because AMD didn't generally release direct drivers for them, you had to rely on the OEMs.
"If you aren't doing a dozen installation steps manually, is the machine truly yours?" /s not /s
I am typing this comment on a Thinkpad T14 Gen 1 (year 2020?) that I bought used just so that I can run OpenBSD with minimal fuzz. I haven't attempted FreeBSD on it yet, but will likely give it a go, too (my DIY NAS runs FreeBSD 15 with ZFS pools). The laptop compat work by the FreeBSD Foundation is certainly appreciated.
For now it certainly feels like Linux back in the 2000's, but as OP said "There's work to be done, and this is front lines effort".
I've been running FreeBSD as a daily driver on (very carefully selected) laptops since the late 2010s.
I found that at, at the time, there was indeed a lot of work to do in setting up a FreeBSD desktop. So I scripted it, chucked those scripts in a Git repo, and have been tinkering with them to make them more useful, and keep them current, ever since. E.g. switching from StumpWM to i3 in anticipation of having to switch to Sway on Wayland, eventually.
Apparently there's now a desktop installer underway, which should address @technomancy's valid observation, and, potentially obsolete a whole swathe of my setup scripts too :)
Poor WiFi support is mostly a thing of the past, thanks to LinuxKPI and the new iwlwifi driver. If you have one of the common Intel cards, chances are it will just work.
I also tried FreeBSD 13/14 on my desktop and the slow speeds I was getting due to the driver limits was a non-starter for me. I'm happy to see this limit go away and who knows, next time like I'm feeling like trying something new out on my desktop I'll give FreeBSD another shot.
Fun fact, the RTL8812 wifi driver is available on FreeBSD for ages now (over 10y iirc), while on Linux it was only added in kernel ~6.13.
Not sure why it was an out-of-tree module on Linux for so long (license?).